Group-invariant solutions of a nonlinear acoustics model

Based on a recent classification of subalgebras of the symmetry algebra of the Zabolotskaya-Khokhlov equation, all similarity reductions of this equation into ordinary differential equations are obtained. Large classes of group-invariant solutions of the equation are also determined, and some properties of the reduced equations and exact solutions are discussed.Comment: 14 page

Supervised Learning with Similarity Functions

We address the problem of general supervised learning when data can only be accessed through an (indefinite) similarity function between data points. Existing work on learning with indefinite kernels has concentrated solely on binary/multi-class classification problems. We propose a model that is generic enough to handle any supervised learning task and also subsumes the model previously proposed for classification. We give a "goodness" criterion for similarity functions w.r.t. a given supervised learning task and then adapt a well-known landmarking technique to provide efficient algorithms for supervised learning using "good" similarity functions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on three important super-vised learning problems: a) real-valued regression, b) ordinal regression and c) ranking where we show that our method guarantees bounded generalization error. Furthermore, for the case of real-valued regression, we give a natural goodness definition that, when used in conjunction with a recent result in sparse vector recovery, guarantees a sparse predictor with bounded generalization error. Finally, we report results of our learning algorithms on regression and ordinal regression tasks using non-PSD similarity functions and demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms, especially that of the sparse landmark selection algorithm that achieves significantly higher accuracies than the baseline methods while offering reduced computational costs.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of NIPS 2012, 30 page

Group properties and invariant solutions of a sixth-order thin film equation in viscous fluid

Using group theoretical methods, we analyze the generalization of a one-dimensional sixth-order thin film equation which arises in considering the motion of a thin film of viscous fluid driven by an overlying elastic plate. The most general Lie group classification of point symmetries, its Lie algebra, and the equivalence group are obtained. Similar reductions are performed and invariant solutions are constructed. It is found that some similarity solutions are of great physical interest such as sink and source solutions, travelling-wave solutions, waiting-time solutions, and blow-up solutions.Comment: 8 page